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Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Recent Online Discoveries

I’d like to devote this post to sharing some recent online discoveries of film websites and writings. And perhaps you might also recommend some good sites that should be better known than they are?

-- Great news: Fergus Daly has set up a page with links to over 50 of his pieces. Daly is a terrific critic and filmmaker based in Dublin. He co-wrote the book Leos Carax (Manchester Univesity Press, 2003), and made the documentaries Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (with Pat Collins) and Experimental Conversations (I transcribed all of Nicole Brenez’s interview responses from this movie in an earlier post). Lots of great reading here.

-- A treasure trove of reading in the first two issues of the journal Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema: Issue #1 (pieces by Jean-Luc Godard, Henri Langlois, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jean Douchet and Quintin); and the just-released Issue #2 (interviews with Jacques Rancière and Bernard Eisenschitz and many other pieces).

Much of this site is not yet operating, but the INTERVIEWS section of FIGURE/GROUND COMMUNICATION - take the time to explore its various parts - has much great stuff, including Steven Shaviro: start here at http://figureground.ca/interviews/scholarly-series/

Thanks for all the links, Girish, as well as to those of you who have posted others. I just wanted to add to Adrian's and your rec on Murphy's site that his book on independent-cinema screenplays, Me and You and Memento and Fargo, is well worth reading.

Thanks for the link, Girish! What a great selection of links you curated, like always, this is the place for great film links.

Anyways, if I have any recommendation, it is for Jerome Silbergeld's "China Into Film", a great new book, where Kaige & Yimou are argued to be the post-Cultural Revolution Fifth Generation modernist rupture with Yellow Earth and Red Sorghum, which get a close analysis (the films are both modernist and traditional). It's art historical perspective illustrate how the films build, and are, influenced by paintings; and it is a great addition to the literature, alongside the socio-industrial angle of Zhang, and the multidisciplinary approach (auteur, stylistic, actor) of Berry and Farquhar.

-I remember you posted a while back Olivier's favorite films from the 70s. These are his favorite films from the 80s:http://olivierpere.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/les-meilleurs-films-des-annees-80-best-films-of-the-80s/